About
We founded Junu Jungle because of our passion to support building sustainable lifestyles with an emphasis on style. We believe most people love the Earth and want to protect it. We all make choices counter to that because of convenience or a clear lack of choices. Modern society has pushed us to choose modern conveniences that rely on plastic or hidden pollutants. We look to nature to provide for us, as nature always has, and to do it with style.
The Founders
Puja Thomas-Patel
Puja was born in Southern California and grew up living back and forth between Southern California and India, moving countries every three or four years until she turned 17.
Sustainability has been a lifelong passion. Puja works as a transportation consultant, helping businesses and governments figure out how to shift travel behavior from a culture of driving to more sustainable modes such as public transit and biking.
In India, she lived in Mumbai and went to a boarding school in Panchgani for most of her high school years. As a schoolkid that meant a lot of code-switching — having to change and adapt according to the culture, she was in. As an adult, she started to merge the two cultures into one. She developed a style in her design aesthetic, and her cooking, that reflected her upbringing. Block printing has a long and important history in India. Puja designs and block prints for Junu Jungle.
She loves that she can combine her passions for design and sustainability through Junu Jungle and she is excited to share her designs with you.Other Projects:
Other Projects:
Stephen Thomas-Patel
Steve is a coder, his professional career has been as a web developer. Web development taught him systems thinking while also giving him creative outlets, where he could sometimes incorporate side hobbies such as photography and writing.
He picked up gardening as a hobby during the pandemic and learned about native plants and permaculture. A better word for gardening is digging and while digging he spent a lot of time thinking about his plot of land and how it fits into the wider world.
“I made extensive changes to the land I was working on, with the goal of better serving the ecosystem it was a part of. As I made changes, I did it with the knowledge that each of the little changes I was making ultimately meant nothing if my neighbors did not do them as well.”
His intention for Junu Jungle is to inspire others to make similar changes, and to help them to do it however they can. He wants the purchasing decisions we all make to have positive impacts on the world.
Two Other Project He Works On:
What’s in a Name?
Jūnu Jungle, pronounced “joonu jungle”, means “Old Forest.” Forests once covered 48% of the earth, now they make up less than 10%.
Forest continues to be destroyed for lumber and pulp, or to make room for farms, mining, building cities and other human activities. Junu Jungle was founded on the idea that we could do our part to stop this trend.
Our Business Philosophy
Junu Jungle follows the ethics of permaculture:
We believe industries need to work to protect the remaining forests and to work toward bringing back what has been lost.
- We follow permaculture 12 principles of design:
Observe and interact. - Catch and store energy.
- Obtain a yield.
- Apply self-regulation and accept feedback.
- Use and value renewable resources and services.
- Produce no waste.
- Design from patterns to details.
- Integrate rather than segregate.
- Use small and slow solutions.
- Use and value diversity.
- Use edges and value the marginal.
- Creatively use and respond to change.
Junu Jungle relies on smart design and high quality craftsmanship to replace the world’s throwaway and synthetic culture with quality materials provided to us by nature.